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Ever since Dish Network's last long-term carriage contract with Disney expired last fall, Dish chairman Charlie Ergen has been insisting that he wouldn't do a new deal "just to make a buck" -- that any new agreement had to reflect the evolving realities of the television business.

Ergen kept to his word. Dish and Disney just announced the signing of a new long-term carriage deal, and it's as transformative as Ergen promised, even if it does undercut somewhat his avowed commitment to giving subscribers control over how they watch. Since last October, the two sides had been operating under a temporary pact, with the threat of a blackout of ABC, and other Disney channels in Dish's 14 million households looming.

In its broadest outlines, the deal helps each company push back what it had seen as an existential threat. Disney has been worried that the automatic commercial-skipping enabled by Dish's DVR, the Hopper, could undermine the ad-supported television model, while Ergen has made it no secret that he believes Dish's core business of subscription satellite TV is about to start declining.

Those mutual anxieties set the table for a quid pro quo. Under the terms of the new carriage deal, AutoHop (as the ad-skipping feature is known) won't be enabled for ABC shows until they've passed out of the three-day window of ratings measurement used to set ad rates. Dish is also signing on to carry a raft of networks it didn't previously, including Disney Junior, Fusion and a new channel ESPN is launching dedicated to the SEC conference.

For its part, Dish gains the right to offer programming from ABC, ABC Family, ESPN, ESPN2 and the Disney Channel as part of a new internet-delivered subscription service it plans to launch. While various deals have been rumored to be in the works between big entertainment conglomerates and would-be "over-the-top" TV providers like and , this is the first one to become official.

As part of the agreement, Disney is also dropping its lawsuit against Dish over the Hopper. Like , and NBC, Disney had claimed the technology constituted an illegal form of copyright infringement.